Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults

[zuma]

Caveat... I must be from an Alien race 'cause do not subscribe to any political doctrine, I reckon politicians are all clowns, and regard the current political divide as force that diminishes the freedom and wealth of democratic nations...

Nevertheless, youse all may find interesting a scientific article that has found significant differences in the politically leaning brain:

Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults

Current Biology, Volume 21, Issue 8, 677-680, 07 April 2011

Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved.

10.1016/j.cub.2011.03.017

Summary

Substantial differences exist in the cognitive styles of liberals and conservatives on psychological measures [1]. Variability in political attitudes reflects genetic influences and their interaction with environmental factors [2,3]. Recent work has shown a correlation between liberalism and conflict-related activity measured by event-related potentials originating in the anterior cingulate cortex [4]. Here we show that this functional correlate of political attitudes has a counterpart in brain structure. In a large sample of young adults, we related self-reported political attitudes to gray matter volume using structural MRI. We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala. These results were replicated in an independent sample of additional participants. Our findings extend previous observations that political attitudes reflect differences in self-regulatory conflict monitoring [4] and recognition of emotional faces [5] by showing that such attitudes are reflected in human brain structure. Although our data do not determine whether these regions play a causal role in the formation of political attitudes, they converge with previous work [4,6] to suggest a possible link between brain structure and psychological mechanisms that mediate political attitudes.

[Peter11216]

This all sounds a little dubious to me. Just in the abstract they make, or probably make, an error stating their findings. Their statement of their findings---I think---should read the following: "We found that greater [self-reported "liberalism"] was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater [self-reported "conservatism"] was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala."

While I am not going to bother looking at anything more than the abstract, I'm guess that they are misstating what they've actually done. They haven't found any correlation between liberalism or conservatism and brain structure. It might be an important distinction since neither term is particularly well defined, so it's rather tough to say what unites people who self-identify as conservative or liberal other than that very fact itself.

Best,

Pete

Caveat... I must be from an Alien race 'cause do not subscribe to any political doctrine, I reckon politicians are all clowns, and regard the current political divide as force that diminishes the freedom and wealth of democratic nations...

Nevertheless, youse all may find interesting a scientific article that has found significant differences in the politically leaning brain:

Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults

Current Biology, Volume 21, Issue 8, 677-680, 07 April 2011

Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved.

10.1016/j.cub.2011.03.017

Summary

Substantial differences exist in the cognitive styles of liberals and conservatives on psychological measures [1]. Variability in political attitudes reflects genetic influences and their interaction with environmental factors [2,3]. Recent work has shown a correlation between liberalism and conflict-related activity measured by event-related potentials originating in the anterior cingulate cortex [4]. Here we show that this functional correlate of political attitudes has a counterpart in brain structure. In a large sample of young adults, we related self-reported political attitudes to gray matter volume using structural MRI. We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala. These results were replicated in an independent sample of additional participants. Our findings extend previous observations that political attitudes reflect differences in self-regulatory conflict monitoring [4] and recognition of emotional faces [5] by showing that such attitudes are reflected in human brain structure. Although our data do not determine whether these regions play a causal role in the formation of political attitudes, they converge with previous work [4,6] to suggest a possible link between brain structure and psychological mechanisms that mediate political attitudes.